Something's Rotten in the State of Israel

From a recent article by Gideon Levy:

Israel's only real existential danger is losing U.S. support. Yes, there is no Israel without America - not only the $30 billion annual defense aid (without which the IDF would be a shadow of itself), or the market for one-third of Israeli exports, but also international support. Israel, which has become a leper in many circles, is lost without Washington's sponsorship. There is no alternative superpower - having Micronesia alone on our side at the UN will not get us very far.

There is Israel without America - the nation of Israel, not the state of Israel. Recall the words of the righteous gentile Friedrich Nietzsche from Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies; and this lie slips from its mouth: "I, the state, am the people." It is a lie!

The most fanatical Zionists and the most fanatical anti-Zionists have united to propagate that lie. The result has been to bind the Jewish nation to the fate of one political entity, which in turn is bound to the fate of one other political entity. Americans are turning against their country's blind support of Israel, and so they should. It is unhealthy for two countries to be so closely bound together, as hatred for the one seeps over into hatred for the other - and both seep over into hatred of the Jews in general. I have the utmost respect for the secular Zionist pioneers, and I am ashamed to see the nation-state they built degenerate into a vassalage held in thrall by a coterie of cowboy zealots (settlers and Christian Zionists).

Forget the Palestinians or human rights issues. The continued impasse between Israel and the Arab world, if left festering, will result in: heightened emigraton from Israel to Europe and the United States (so be careful what you wish for, anti-Zionists); alienation of moderate Jews from their people due to the establishment party-line that the ghetto-state of Israel is commensurate with the broader nation of Israel; and increased anti-Semitism and criticism of Israel among former allies, particularly as their Muslim populations grow and their Jewish populations decline.

A recent article from Foreign Policy magazine highlights the demographic future of the state of Israel:

In 1960, the Israeli Central Statistical Bureau (ICSB) reported that just 15 percent of students in the Israeli primary-school system were either Israeli Arabs or haredim. Now, about 46 percent are. Around 2020, the majority of primary-school students will likely be composed of children from those two groups, each segregated into its own segment of the school system. And though, at current rates, it will be well beyond the time horizon of our current projections before these two politically disparate groups "dominate" the Israeli electorate, by 2030 they are likely to be very close to composing half of all 18- and 19-year olds, the youngest tier of the electorate and the age at which Israelis are first eligible for conscription -- a dramatic shift in Israeli ethnic and religious composition.

The options for Israel are not A) make painful sacrifices for the sake of potential peace or B) maintain the status quo indefinitely. The options are rather A) make painful sacrifices for the sake of potential peace or B) keep doing nothing until the country becomes a Rhodesian theocracy or descends into civil war.

The task of the biblical prophets was not to flatter the men in power. It was to tell them the painful truth. I side with Jeremiah and Isaiah over stone-throwing yeshiva thugs, and I hearken to the words of that latter-day prophet Nietzsche:

Here, however, we are experiencing the consequences of the doctrine, lately preached from all the rooftops, that the state is the highest goal of mankind and that a man has no higher duty than to serve the state: in which doctrine I recognize a relapse not into paganism but into stupidity. It may be that a man who sees his highest duty in serving the state really knows no higher duties; but there are men and duties existing beyond this--and one of the duties that seems, at least to me, to be higher than serving the state demands that one destroy stupidity in every form, and therefore in this form too.

The highest goal of the Jew (and of all men) is not to serve the interests of state, even an ostensibly Jewish state; it is to serve the interests of truth.